Boonville Beer vs. Bruce Bread — True History From Back In The Day

A simmering landlord-tenant dispute between the founding father of Boonville-brewed beer and the determined owner of Bruce Bread boiled over Wednesday afternoon at the landmark Farrer Building in downtown Boonville.

Ken Allen of the Boonville Brewery owned the Farrer Building, a rambling structure erected as an all-purpose country store and community center in 1875. Everything from household goods to farm supplies was sold downstairs. The second floor served as a dance hall and, on occasion, a courtroom.

The rambling 19th century structure had been unoccupied for many years until John Parducci, the well-known Ukiah vintner, spruced it up and began renting parts of it as shop space. Allen, who’d arrived in Boonville in the late 1970s as a chiropractor, had been cracking bones in the house behind the Farrer Building until he bought the Farrer Building from Parducci.

Allen, with the late, talented David Norfleet, had gone into the brewery business in the middle 1980s, a business that quickly grew into a nationally distributed premium beer. Allen soon built a brewpub, designed by local architect Harry Glasscock on the north side of the Farrer Building which remains open today as a bar and restaurant with a fledgling whiskey distillery downstairs.

The property is presently owned by Gary Island of Boonville. Island also owns the venerable I&E Lath Mill in Philo.

Allen's craft beer was so successful it soon outgrew its central Boonville premises and relocated its brewing facilities to a new series of industrial structures at the intersection of the Ukiah Road and Highway 128 not far from its original premises in central Boonville.

The unimproved rear area of the Farrer Building became the home of Bruce Bread, justly famed throughout Mendocino and Sonoma counties for years for combining wholesome ingredients into healthy breads free of the medicinal-like flavor and the dense heft of most organic breads.

Bruce Bread was begun by Bruce Hering and his daughters Diane and Ellen. Their bakery grew to include their friends and friends of friends as mostly part-time employees.

In the late 1990s, the Herings sold Bruce Bread to Mrs. Loftsgaard-Trevino. She had worked with the Herings for several years before assuming ownership of the business. Under her auspices the bakery continued to grow, with distribution throughout Mendocino County and much of Sonoma County.

As the yeast rose in mid-bake late one Wednesday afternoon, Allen suddenly appeared with a workman who proceeded to change the locks on the doors as the bellicose Allen demanded that Mrs. Bread abandon her business as soon as the bread was out of the ovens.

Mrs. Bread called for a deputy.

“He — Allen — lost it completely,” a startled passerby said of Allen’s top-decibel tantrum. “It seemed like he was yelling at everyone, including Deputy Squires. I thought maybe the deputy was going to arrest him.”

Deputy Squires chose not to arrest Allen, a long-time local resident, but instead reminded Allen that he couldn't march into an ongoing business and order it closed.

Deputies Squires and Scott Nordin escorted Allen to his vehicle and Allen drove off.

It was the lease between Allen and Mary Loftsgaard-Trevino that landlord Allen wanted to break. He also seemed to want to break his tenant’s neck.

“I called Keith,” Mrs. Loftsgaard-Trevino said. “The way he, Allen, came barging in here and the way he was yelling scared me and all my employees. They ran off and hid while he yelled at me.”

Allen had rented the rear area of the 19th century structure to Bruce Bread. Mrs. L-T had assumed the lease.

The space occupied by the bakery was barely habitable, let alone suitable for commercial bread making. Its floor was collapsing in several areas, the wiring was inadequate to the demands placed on it by industrial baking equipment, water sometimes flowed to the building and sometimes didn't, and field mice were so brazenly numerous they seemed to be mobilizing for a final assault on all of Allen’s Farrer Building tenants.

And there was the rub.

Bruce Bread said that the landlord, the imperious Allen, refused to make the basic repairs to the space he was obligated to make.

Allen said, “If you don’t like the space, leave.”

“I’ve been here two years this coming March,” Mrs. Loftsgaard-Trevino sighed. Look at it. I pay $1,450 a month for this and he wants me to pay more but he refuses to fix anything. Rent was supposed to go up 5% this month. But I called him up to tell him the electricity has gone out again and he comes over here and says, ‘Don’t touch the outlets.’ Then he throws the breaker switch back on.”

And when Mrs. Bruce Bread said she would not pay more until Allen held up his end of their contract, Allen burst through Bruce Bread’s door, ordered Mrs. Bruce Bread and her workers out, and changed the locks.

The next day, a Thursday, the bakery was up and running again.

Mrs. L-T went home, cried for a while, thought about it, and resolved to fight back. “I just decided he’s not going to do that to me,” she said. “My whole life is in this business. My family’s life is in this business. All of the women who work here have bills to pay and families to feed. All I’ve asked him to do is the basics: fix the floor so we can move new equipment in without it falling into the dirt; get an exterminator in here regularly to keep the mice out; fix the wiring so we don’t have to worry about a fire every time we turn a mixer on; and treat us like human beings. Is that asking too much?

One wouldn’t suppose so, but Allen, who began commercial life in Boonville as a starving chiropractor in a house that doubled as his office and his home behind the Farrer Building he now owned, has never been known as a particularly congenial fellow. And since striking it rich in the beer business and becoming Boonville’s only on-site working mogul, Allen’s famously pricklish personality seems to have become more prick than ish.

One doesn’t have to look hard to confirm Mrs. Bread's distress with her landlord and his ancient building. Above a skewed light fixture the ceiling is scorched from a recent fire that was discovered only because it exploded into flame while the busy bakery’s eight employees were in full production below; if the bakery had been closed it is likely the whole structure would have gone up in flames. The uneven floorboards, now some 125 years old, threatened to give out entirely and have partially collapsed in several places, making footing in the murky light of the cave-like space a kind of gamble for the busy women rushing from room-to-room with the day’s quota of fresh baked goods. The walls were a patchwork of mis-matched lengths of lumber, many of them unpainted, with the painted white ones long ago disappeared behind layers of memorial soot. Two of the bakery’s three rooms were so dark they required round-the-clock illumination. Storage space was so inadequate to the bakery’s ever-greater volume that supplies were stacked on the precarious floor where they made up a kind of free fire zone for the field mice besieging the business from all sides.

When Allen arrived to check on what he assumed were his vacated premises, he became unhinged when he discovered Bruce Bread up and baking again as if the dramatic previous day hadn’t happened.

Jackie Potter-Voll had just arrived at All That Good Stuff, a variety store in the front of Allen’s building. “Why did you let them in?” Allen shouted at Ms. Potter-Voll, a shy woman who worked as a clerk at another shop in the building, All That Good Stuff. Nonplussed, Ms. Potter-Voll tried to explain that she hadn’t let anyone in anywhere.

Allen then re-commenced shouting at Mrs. Bread, who’d changed the locks back so she and her mostly female crew could resume baking, and were baking when Allen stormed back into their workplace, sending the women scurrying to avoid him. He demanded this, threatened that and, tossing out one rather startling ethnic slur to spice up his tirade, exclaimed in response to Mrs. Bread’s statement that he had no legal right to destroy her business, “At least somebody speaks English around here.”

Mrs. Bread had already called 9-1-1 and Deputy Squires was instantly on-site for the second time in two days.

The deputy had been called the previous day to escort the ranting Allen, frothing like one of his custom beers, out the door, down the stairs, into his car, and out of his building. And here was the deputy again, the next day, and here he was escorting the raving Allen out of the building, and here Allen was again in full froth at whatever woman happened into sights, especially women impertinent enough to challenge him.

Thursday may have been Ken Allen’s worst work day ever — three consecutive women had defied him. Jackie Potter-Voll had given him an impromptu personality assessment; Diana Charles had given him a big harrumphing “Try it, big boy,” and Mrs. Bread had informed him she had no intention of abandoning her business just because she happened to have had the misfortune to rent space from a misogynistic nut case. And now the final indignity of being tossed off his own property by a cop! Didn’t any of these people know who he was?

The deputy pointed out to Allen that tenants had rights and that there were regular procedures for settling landlord-tenant disputes. Allen was incredulous as Deputy Squires escorted him to his vehicle and ordered him to leave.

The apoplectic Allen, having spotted Diane Charles next door at the brew pub building Allen also owned, and whose lease Ms. Charles is poised to liberate herself from, had shouted at her, “You’re next!”

Mrs. Bruce Bread was soon served with a letter by Peter Suddeth, who Allen identified as his “property manager” but was, at the time, also managing Allen's wife, whom he subsequently married.

The letter Suddeth served informed Mrs. Bruce Bread that she now had three days to permanently leave the Farrer Building.

“I’ve had to stay here 48 straight hours to hold him off. Where can I find the thousand square feet I need for my business anywhere in this valley?,” the worried business woman asked. “There isn’t that kind of space.”

Mrs. Bread's besieged business later found a more congenial home in Redwood Valley, and the Farrer Building, lived on with essential repairs to its aged premises made by its present owner, Johnny Schmitt.